Episode Summary: A very special 10-year anniversary episode reflecting on a decade of content creation, the story behind 155 consecutive podcast episodes, and Mike's pivot into AI. From Adobe tutorials to RAG systems, hear how he evolved from Tech Handyman to RAG Handyman — and what's next for the Mike Murphy Content Factory.

What You'll Learn

• Why Mike put Mike Murphy Unplugged on the shelf after 155 consecutive weekly episodes
• How a decade of Adobe and creative tutorials turned into 1,700+ YouTube videos
• The scary, deliberate pivot from Adobe tutorials to AI content
• What RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is and why it matters for creators
• The evolution from Tech Handyman to Podcast Handyman to RAG Handyman

The Podcast Origin Story

Mike launched Mike Murphy Unplugged in September 2015, writing 3,500-word scripts every single week and recording them word for word. That pace carried him through 155 consecutive episodes before he hit the wall and had to press pause — not to end the show, but to put it on the shelf while he kept building elsewhere. The podcast is also what led to a book, a Domestika course, a job at a podcast startup, and a long list of relationships in the podcast and creator world.

Content Creation Journey

While the podcast was paused, YouTube became Mike's workshop. The simple formula — learn something useful, fire up ScreenFlow, make a tutorial on the spot — resulted in over 1,700 videos across 10 years, including a 365-videos-in-365-days challenge in 2017. He also wrote hundreds of articles on Medium, rounding out a content trifecta of audio, video, and writing, and started calling himself a "tech handyman" for it.

The AI Transition

After a decade building an audience around Adobe and creative-tutorial content, pivoting to AI content meant real self-doubt: would an audience that expects After Effects tutorials follow along into topics like Hugging Face, vibe coding, and Claude Code? Mike made the leap anyway — learning Python, terminal commands, and automation workflows, and building an AI playground on a virtual private server to experiment in public.

RAG Systems Deep Dive

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is the current focus of Mike's AI work: building AI knowledge bases out of existing content so creators and small businesses can generate new material, develop course outlines, write scripts, and answer audience questions — all in their own voice, pulled from their own back catalog. That idea is the seed of what Mike calls the Mike Murphy Content Factory.

Becoming the RAG Handyman

The identity arc: Tech Handyman → Podcast Handyman → AI Handyman → RAG Handyman. The mission stays the same across every label — make complex systems accessible and practical for content creators and small businesses, not just engineers.

What RAG Can Do For You

Content generation — build on existing work with new angles and ideas Course creation — develop outlines that match your teaching style Script writing — maintain a consistent voice across formats…

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Episode Summary: A Happy New Year check-in — a walk down memory lane through Mike's path from a one-man band in Naples, Florida to nearly a decade of content creation, plus a look ahead at 2024 goals.

What You'll Learn

• Mike's background: English degree, a law school master's he's never used, and a decade of Adobe/creative tech deep-diving
• Why he put his name in the podcast title against conventional advice, and why that still made sense to him
• How Mike Murphy Unplugged led to a full-time job at Simplecast, later acquired by SiriusXM
• The 2024 goals: launching Terrapin Textures digital products, reaching 50,000 YouTube subscribers, and a return trip to the Camino de Santiago

This episode covers: who Mike is and when and why he started his online business and this podcast, what his goals were then versus now, what the future holds for Mike Murphy Unplugged, and what would make 2024 a successful year.

Why His Name Is in the Title

Mike put his name in the podcast title for a reason, despite plenty of advice against it when he first launched: this is his personal show, his audio journal. After publishing over 150 episodes in a row, he put the podcast on the back burner while working a full-time job and shifting focus to YouTube — but he never considered shutting it down. It was always just a matter of time before regular episodes resumed.

Who Is Mike Murphy?

Born in Syracuse, New York, Mike graduated from UMass Amherst with a degree in English and holds a law degree from the University of Denver he's never practiced with. He's lived in Missoula, Montana; Portland, Oregon; Concord, New Hampshire; Durango, Colorado; and now Naples, Florida, where he moved to help friends from Durango open a fine-art portrait studio. Over nearly 10 years there, he built deep expertise in tech, design, creativity, and the Adobe software he still uses today — learning constantly through podcasts, Lynda.com courses, and YouTube, a habit that hasn't changed.

In January 2015, Mike launched his own online business to share what he was learning. By August of that year, he launched Mike Murphy Unplugged to document the journey — the tools, resources, and steps toward making a full-time living as a content creator. Publishing episode one remains one of the proudest moments of his life, not because he had a podcast, but because it marked the start of something meaningful: creating the life he wanted on his own terms.

From Podcast to Career

Mike Murphy Unplugged — and teaching others how to podcast — landed him a full-time job at podcast startup Simplecast, later acquired by SiriusXM. It was a great three-plus year run, but the Zoom-and-Slack grind eventually pushed him toward burnout. The cure was a 40-plus day pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago across France and Spain, an experience so worthwhile it was worth losing the job over when he got back a few months later — and he wasn't sorry about it.

Goals: Then and Now

When Mike started, the goal was simply to make a living learning and teaching creative and technical skills — that North Star ha…

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Episode Summary: A behind-the-scenes look at creating Mike's first online class, Introduction to Adobe Audition, with the creative-education platform Domestika — from the first pitch email to filming in their New York City studios.

What You'll Learn

• What Domestika is and how it works as an online creative-education platform
• What Mike's Introduction to Adobe Audition course covers and who it's for
• The full production timeline, from the first acquisitions email to filming in Domestika's NYC studios
• What it's like to film a course on-location, including finishing the recording right before Hurricane Ian hit

This episode covers: what Domestika is, what the course covers, who it's for, what you'll learn, how to take it, how much it costs, how Mike got started working with Domestika, how he made the course, and how it's gone since launch. There's also a course trailer on YouTube.

What Is Domestika?

Domestika is a multi-lingual online learning platform offering courses and workshops across creative topics — design, illustration, photography, animation, and more. It originated in Spain, has been around for over 20 years, and is one of the largest platforms for creative education in the world, with over 8 million registered students across 50-plus countries and 8 languages.

The Course: Introduction to Adobe Audition

Adobe Audition is a digital audio workstation (DAW) used for recording, editing, mixing, and mastering audio — part of the Adobe Creative Cloud bundle, used by podcasters, content creators, film and video editors, sound designers, and musicians. If you've used Pro Tools, Logic Pro, Reaper, Audacity, or GarageBand, Audition serves the same role.

The course is for content creators, podcasters, musicians, sound designers, and anyone wanting to learn Audition, whether brand new to audio production or a seasoned pro switching DAWs. Domestika's Basics courses are its best-selling format, aimed at beginners and broken into mini-courses with practice lessons at the end of each section.

What you'll learn:

1. Getting Started with Adobe Audition
2. Adding Media and Recording Audio
3. Editing: Waveform and Multitrack
4. Effects and Processing
5. Exporting and Saving Projects

You can find the course at mikemurphy.co/domestika. Pricing and any promotional discount mentioned in the original episode are specific to the March 2023 launch window and are not repeated here since they're almost certainly stale — check the course page directly for current pricing.

Timeline for Making the Course

June 2022 — An acquisitions/curation manager based in NYC reached out, and Mike had an introductory call to discuss course ideas. Domestika didn't yet have a Basics course on Audition, so that became the direction. Within days of the call, Mike received and signed a proposal.

July 2022 (Course Structure) — Mike met with his assigned content manag…

Read the complete show notes and resources on mikemurphy.ai.

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